Overall great NGO but with bureaucracy inefficiency
Avantages
Overall good working environment and benefits like monthly bonus for health insurance and 50% home office time. Very international, with colleagues really coming from all diverse places over the world. Some great passionate staff actually doing their best for the cause. Some teams have an excellent atmosphere. Stimulating to contribute to a greater environmental cause. Excellent work/life balance overall, with easy possibility to work from home even for more than 50% when needed punctually. For expats, they cover our home trips every 2 years. Internal fiduciary paid by the employer for your taxes. Good quality canteen, but not cheap. Great facilities, parking, locker room and showers, etc.
Inconvénients
Lots of inefficiencies, bureaucracy and lack of logical management decision. Project teams spend too much time doing time sheets and administrative work. Lack of ownership and responsibility taking, leading to slow progress in internal improvement projects. Lack of vision in digital transformation, too much attention spent on unimportant details without seeing the greater picture, leading the organisation to be years behind in ICT tools which could improve productivity. Somehow very political environment so some decisions, actions or even the overall vision, often don't seem logical. Same goes for budgets allocations. IUCN has a tax agreement with Switzerland but compared to some other NGO they actually withhold the equivalent amount directly on your salary to fund their internal/backoffice staff. Atmosphere in most teams and departments isn't that great, management can be negative and there are a lot of burn outs here and there each year. Some staff are way overwhelmed by quantity of work and no sufficient budget to hire help, while other really don't look that busy. Large part of staff has been here for decades and doesn't realise how's work elsewhere nor the advantages they benefit from, making their complaints a bit unrealistic. That said, salaries aren't that high though and have lacked revision for many yeas now. Current geopolitical situation for NGOs is hard and same goes for IUCN, so we expect some more staff to be let go in months to come.
